Settler Colonialism and Cultural Studies

Cultural Studies Projects Can Unknowingly Circulate Indigenous Erasure

This special issue on settler colonialism and cultural production seeks to intervene in cultural studies, drawing on Indigenous studies and approaches to analyzing settler colonialism to untangle the cultural and material work of settlement as a foundational solipsism of U.S. and global relations of power and control. Cultural studies’ theorizations of race, space, and colonization have yet to adequately grapple with the politics of settlement on Indigenous land. Critical cultural studies projects are often grounded in assumptions that presume and erase settler colonial epistemologies so that even in our best attempts to challenge systems of exclusion and privilege unwittingly reify the normatively White Enlightenment subject, and the settler colonial grounds on which it is formed. For Chickasaw theorist, Jodi Byrd, the production of critical projects like cultural studies circulates through the erasure of Indigenous genocide and conquest. Byrd’s (2011) careful genealogical critique reveals that “prevailing understandings of race and racialization within U.S. post-colonial, area, and queer studies depend upon an historical aphasia of the conquest of indigenous peoples” (p. 24). The methods culture critics deploy, like genealogy and deconstruction, presume, and participate in the erasure of Indigenous peoples as modern subjects, but rather as “located outside temporality and presence,” which is particularly egregious in the “face of the very present and ongoing colonization of indigenous lands, resources, and lives” (Byrd, 2011, p. 6). Byrd (2011) underscores how “the savage and the ‘Indian’ . . . serves as the ground and pre-condition for structuralism and formalism, as well as their posts” and persists as a “an undeconstructable core within critical theories that attempt to dismantle how knowledge, power, and language function” (p. 10). The figure of the Native as the “undeconstructable core” within the knowledge/power/language formation of cultural studies circulates as an undigested subtext.

Our unwitting reproduction of settler logics are foundational to our theorizations of racial, (post)colonial, and material formations as our knowledge production not only erases the identities experience of first nations peoples but also perpetuates and remains complicit with settler projects: the “disappearance” of Native peoples, the theft and privatization of land for profit, and the ongoing genocide of Indigenous people. In part, then, this special issue aims to offer the field of cultural studies host of theoretical resources and methodological approaches to settler colonial studies as a way to deepen our treatment of settler cultural formations to begin the dirty work of deconstructing the rhetorical and material practices of settler colonialism. For instance, Whiteness must be more fully interrogated as a settler project, especially within U.S. contexts; imperialism must be theorized as productive of, but not the same as, settler colonialism; popular cultural studies should be radically rethought through a critical examination of pervasive representations that disappear Indigenous peoples. Works in settler colonial studies may be at their best when they engage Indigenous theorizations of genocide and survivance, especially in conversation with Black theorizations of anti-Blackness and futurity. As such, settler colonial studies provides a vibrant examination of power relations in its extensive treatment of such topics as sovereignty, nationalism and nation formation; imperial formations, genocide, removal, colonial legacies; the politics of land, landedness, space and place; intersectionality, queer theory, gender studies; race, racialization, White supremacy; affect studies; futurities, materialities, environmentalism, new materialism; and tourism and travel.

New approaches to a variety of the above topics are of urgent importance to cultural studies practitioners. Yet, with the exception of a handful of scholars, treatments of settler colonialism have largely remained undertheorized in cultural studies, where concepts like “settlers” and “settlement” appear as secondary categories—if they appear at all. For instance, while postcolonial critics have attended to settler colonialism in their theorizations of nation-state and imperial formations, the “post” remains a vexed term in Native studies, where any move to place colonialism in the past risks reifying the myth of the disappearing Indian and the naturalized settler. While Indigenous studies and postcolonial studies draw on a similar cannon (i.e., Frantz Fanon) and attend to related questions of thinking and imaging beyond the colonial, the fields have yet to build strong ties (Byrd & Rothberg, 2011). In spite of theoretical and political affinities, the conversations between these fields, Jodi Byrd and Michael Rothenberg argue, have “largely been foreclosed” (p. 4). Among other reasons, Indigenous scholars are suspicious of the “post” in relation to “colonial” for “confronting the ongoing colonization of native lands remains at the top of the agenda for indigenous peoples” (Byrd & Rothberg, 2011, p. 4). Indigenous scholars also question the “fit” between “models developed as a response to colonization of Indian subcontinent and Africa” and those that emerge in response to settler state formations (Byrd & Rothberg, 2011, p. 4). Unlike the postcolonial, the project of decolonization is centrally concerned with the settlement of Indigenous land, which is “rooted in the elimination of Indigenous peoples, polities and relationships from and with the land,” making the field “conceptually distinct from other kinds of communication” (Snelgrove et al., 2014, pp. 7-8).

In their essay, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang argue that we must interrogate our treatments of “decolonization” as a noun (decolonization), instead of a verb (decolonize). When we prioritize social justice, civil rights, and equality efforts, it is easy to elide the more uncomfortable work of examining questions of landedness, racial categories, and settlement. In the process, we turn “decolonization” into a metaphor. By centering settler colonialism, Tuck and Yang (2012) rethink racial categories in terms of a “triad structure of settler-Indigenous-chattel slave,” arguing “the decolonial desires of white, nonwhite, immigrant, postcolonial, and oppressed people, can similarly be entangled in resettlement, reoccupation, and reinhabitation that actually further settler colonialism” (p. 2). But this rethinking is not a remaking of racial categories. The triad, at least in Tuck and Yang’s configuration, is not a closed set; it is not trying to explain everything. Cramped into a footnote on page 7 and taken up more fully elsewhere (Tuck, Guess, & Sultan, 2014), Tuck and Yang (2012) caution that settler-Indigenous-chattel slave are not analogues—that is, they are not uniform units that are just a little different from each other. Indigeneity precedes and supersedes settler colonialism; chattel slavery is not an identity, not a stand-in for Blackness. Tiffany Lethabo King (2014) has rightly pointed out the limits of theorizing Black life as fungible, and the pained logics of cohering Blackness as labor. King (2014) observes,

While labor as a discourse may work for non-Black and non-Native people of color as a way of interpellating themselves within settler colonial relations, it does not explain Black presence, Black labor or Black use in White settler nation-states. Theories that attempt to triangulate Blackness into the Settler/Native antagonism in White settler states do so by positing Blackness as the labor force that helps make the settler landscape possible. It is true that Black labor literally tills, fences in and cultivates the settler’s land. However, this singular analysis both obscures the issue of Black fungibility and reduces Blackness to a mere tool of settlement rather than a constitutive element of settler colonialism’s conceptual order. (n.p.)

Thus, the triad is insufficient to describe anything but a set of relations, a set of antagonisms (Wilderson, 2010). And they are not just a set of relationships to one another but also relationships to place. In attending to these relations, possibilities for practice and politics emerge. Possibilities for (contingent) collaborations, (re)interpretations, remixes, and audiences make themselves known.

Formulations of relationships structured by settler colonialism underscore the necessity to move beyond a mantra of gender, race, class, sexuality, and other intersections of power to explore how racial categories interact with occupation, the extraction of wealth, and the ongoing settlement of land that continues to dispossess Native populations because “colonial subjects who are displaced by external colonialism, as well as racialized and minoritized by internal colonialism, still occupy and settle stolen Indigenous land” (Tuck & Yang, 2012, p. 7).

Invitations and Incommensurabilities

This decolonizing framework prioritizes Indigenous sovereignty and futurity, making it “incommensurable” with human and civil rights social justice projects as some elements of these processes cannot be aligned. Thus, a decolonizing project requires an “ethic of incommensurability,” which evokes a complex process of affective labor—the formation of “contingent coalitions” that may “feel very unfriendly” (Tuck & Yang, 2012, p. 35). Contingency and incommensurability mark the tricky affective terrain of building coalitions and doing cultural studies work that centers questions of Indigeneity and landedness—in ways that both align with and radically break from the work in affect studies. Affect studies has been inspired by interdisciplinary conversations across the humanities and the sciences, including psychoanalysis, theories of the body and embodiment, poststructuralism, political theory, and queer theorizations of melancholy and trauma, inspired by the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza, Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and Brian Massumi. So while the affective turn has inspired many culture critics and queer theorists to productively interrogate the social, cultural, and psychoanalytic terrain of the seemingly individualized experience of feeling, sensation, and trauma, work in this field often presumes a universalized subject of emotion, unmarked by geography or even social location—and “innocent” of any complicity to settlement.

What kinds of knowledges might scholars of affect studies develop if they centered questions of land, landedness, and Native dispossession? In On Sympathetic Grounds: Race, Gender, and Affective Geographies in Nineteenth-Century North America, Naomi Greyser (2016) maps emotions about, for, and from the land in contestations over the settlement of North America. Her work “excavates the land as an active participant in and literal and figurative landscape for, contestations over stewardship, territory and sovereignty” to “hold in view the displacements that constitute North America as a place” (Greyser, 2016). Foregrounding affect and geography, Greyser decenters a universal, ungrounded affective subject that often circulates within affect studies, instead attending to indigenous and settler relationships to native homelands, and the affective labor through which settlement and decolonization are mobilized. Her work challenges new materialists and affect theorists to account for a long and diverse history of tribal philosophies and practices in their thinking about matter and spirit, affect and animacy, as she attends to the uneven distribution of agency across bodies, surfaces, and substances.

Affect studies draws on psychoanalytic treatments of the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real, with wholeness and lack, with memory, displacement, and haunting, to frame trauma in ways that produce “multiple subjectivities and multiple modernities expressed in new forms of history, often presented at first in autobiographical experimental writings by diasporic subjects” (Clough, 2007, p. 6). While these writings productively interrogate conditions of knowability, representation, and memory, in the absence of a framework that foregrounds geography and the relationship between experiences of trauma and the land, they have no necessary relationship to decolonization. Dian Million (Tanana Athabascan) defines trauma as “suppos[ing] a violence that overwhelms, wounding individual (and collective) psyche, sometimes suspending access to memory” (Million, 2013, p. 2). Her definition resonates with and draw upon the work in affect studies, but Million leverages Indigenous accounts of trauma to “explode the measured ‘objective’ accounts of Canadian (and US) colonial histories” (Million, 2013, p. 31).

For Million (2013), Indigenous women’s narratives are productively understood as felt knowledges that expose a “limit and boundary where white academia designated them incomprehensible,” which is inextricably linked to “the self-determination Indigenous peoples” as they “affectively work out . . . painful political, social, and personal conundrums with the state” (p. 2). So even as affect studies provides a point of entry for powerfully interrogating the conditions of trauma that resonate with Indigenous experiences as subjects of assimilation and objects of genocide and ongoing dispossession (as Million analyzes) and can be powerfully leveraged to expose processes of dispossession (in Greyser’s work), the field of affect studies remains wedded to an ungrounded, unbounded universal subject.

Such land- and Indigenous-centered frameworks invite culture critics to examine how social, material, and rhetorical practices are shaped through settlement and the formation of the White subject as a settler subject. And in doing so would also entail an attention to the uneven distribution of affects and affective processes—the very constitution of some subjects as always-already affecting, while “others” are slotted as “affectable.” In her concept of ethnographic entrapment, Denise Ferreira Da Silva’s (2007) articulation of the construction of the human as formed through a form of self-determination mobilized through the Western subject’s power over and distinction from “affectable others.” Building on Ferreira Da Silva’s work, Andrea Smith (2010) argues this quality of affectability is a condition of self-determination, settlement, and racialization as the “Western subject differentiates itself from conditions of ‘affectability’ by separating from affectable others” (p. 42). Similar to cultural studies treatments of the production of Whiteness and racial difference, the racialized subject awaits humanity through a movement toward universality, yet distinct is Ferreira Da Silva and Smith’s attention to self-determination as defined by the capacity to “affect” and not be affected by others. This “humanizing” project is grounded in the notion of the sovereign subject as structured by the privatization of land that, in turn, define landed subjects through the erasure of the land theft through which the sovereignty of the settler subject is experienced, organized, and imagined.

Mark Rifkin (2012) argues that

Although U.S. Indian policy formally circulates the topos of self-determination, portraying the federal government as engaging with tribes’ lived sense of landedness and representations of themselves, it continues to foreclose forms of indigeneity, as a residual geopolitics predicated on principles other than those of the liberal state and as the collective memory of an ongoing history of violence. (Locations 109-110)

Reading Ferreira da Silva in conversation with Rifkin underscores the structures of settler colonialism through which the sovereign subject is imagined: through his or her ability to move, affect, displace, or remove first nations people and through the ongoing erasure of various “forms of indigeneity” that belie the myth of manifest destiny.

Summary of Articles

This special issue of Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies (CSCM) invites the interrogation and unsettling of settler colonialism via theoretical, methodological, and affective projects to revise underlying assumptions within cultural studies about sovereignty, racialization, imperialism, and Indigeneity. The essays included here suggest that the absence of critical approaches points to a larger project of disappearance constitutive of ongoing processes of settlement. Authors in this special issue ask how settler colonialism’s violence and genocide shape cultural production and political movements—including critical intellectual projects like cultural studies—as they examine how the processes through which settlement, land theft, and ongoing forms of genocide are maintained, normalized, and erased within the popular imaginary. This special issue of CSCM considers the political stakes of the complicity of cultural studies in settler colonialism and expands, revises, and repurposes the scope of the field’s inquiry, politics, and archive.

We open this special issue with Angie Morrill’s essay, “Time Traveling Dogs (and other Native feminist ways to defy dislocations).” Morrill draws on Toni Morrison’s concept of “rememory” in her reading of Native feminist artist Peggy Ball’s oil painting, Vanport, to explore the artist’s relationship to Vanport, Oregon, a city destroyed in a 1948 flood. Morrill offers a Native feminist reading of Vanport (the artist is her late mother), recalling places, people, and nonhuman companions from a formative place of Morrill’s family’s growing up. Her intimate reading conjoins personal love and loss, family rememories, local histories, and tribal dispossession to expose “the ways Native presence is erased and replaced, but actively restored through rememories.” Morrill reflects on the disappeared city of Vanport as an index for this constellation of personal and collective trauma: “Not only did Vanport disappear, but within 7 years, the Klamath tribe is terminated, Peggy’s father leaves the family, and her mother is wheelchair bound with Multiple Sclerosis.” In spite of these dramatic traumas, Morrill’s tone is restrained as her essay performs loss in queer kinship to rememory: people become “co-present through desire” and “time travel is recognition and survivance” because “hauntings require us to acknowledge how cities and academies are built upon disappearance, and thus unsettle settler colonial nations and settler colonial knowledge.”

In “mini-k’iwh’e:n (for that purpose—I consider things): (Re)writing and (Re)righting Indigenous Menstrual Practices to Intervene on Contemporary Menstrual Discourse,” Cutcha Risling Baldy interrogates the genealogy of the “menstrual taboo” that circulates in menstrual studies and broader Western discourses of menstruation to construct “Indigenous menstrual customs as primitive or oppressive of women,” manifesting a “settler colonial desire to make Indigenous knowledges obsolete and Indigenous ceremonies and cultures primitive remnants of the past.” Risling Baldy examines key texts within menstruation studies to reveal the settler politics of knowledge production that work to erase Indigenous menstrual customs, which were viewed as “detrimental to the settler colonial project because they demonstrated the power to resist settler ideals of domesticity and assimilation.” In response, Risling Baldy offers an alternate genealogy for Indigenous menstrual practices, drawing on an

in-depth analysis of Hupa menstrual practices that we see how Native nations are able to continuously challenge settler colonialism through Indigenous feminisms and provide a decolonizing lens to contemporary scholarship that not only imagines alternative analyses but also acknowledges that these alternatives did, have always and will always exist.

For instance, Risling Baldy points to the central role of the “ch’iłwa:l or women’s coming of age ceremony” in establishing “‘religious dances’ tied to world renewal,” suggesting the “power that women had during this time to help communicate and interact with the balancing power of the universe.”

Jane Griffith examines how White settlers laid claim to land by invoking Black and Indigenous peoples at Hoover Dam in her essay, “Hoover Damn: Land, Labour, and Settler Colonial Cultural Production.” Griffin offers a meditation of the concept of “dam/ning” to explore “how tactics used to preserve white settler memory, history, and claims to land and water seemingly appear to affirm Black and Indigenous lives but in fact veil violence.” Dam/ming points to the “doublethink” at the heart of the Hoover Dam’s construction: On one hand, “damming stimulates the growth of some life and curtails others, all under a banner of harmless progress,” while damning also exposes “the strategies used to thwart and undermine settler-colonial violence, dehumanization, displacement, and land theft.” Leveraging this productively plastic concept, Griffin offers close readings of historical documents, including “personal letters from Hoover Dam’s official artist (1920s-1940s); the Bureau of Reclamation’s magazine (1930s); and the town site’s local newspaper (1979)” to trace the material and discursive conditions through which “the actual, locatable theft and destruction of land” is organized “to further white settlement.”

Theresa Warburton’s essay, “A Similar Place: Resistance and Existence in 21st Century Black and Native Women’s Memoirs,” draws on Leanne Simpson’s notion of “a similar place” as a methodology of “‘indigenous futurity’ that is tied to territory, drawing connection through shared place rather than (only) shared experience of violence.” Warburton takes her struggles to adequately teach the murder of a character in Elizabeth Cook-Lynn’s short story, “A Good Chance,” in conversation with the deaths of Freddie Gray and Sandra Bland, as a point of departure for a “spatial reading of the relationship between anti-black racism and settler colonialism.” While Warburton was keen to engage students in a comparative analysis, she was cautious about facile connections between Black and Native narratives of violence that spectacularize “Black and Native suffering for a classroom of mostly white students.” In response, Warburton develops “a method of pedagogical inquiry that privileges spatial belonging in narratives of resistance, leading to comparative analysis that stems from a foundational recognition of territory rather than one that substitutes acknowledgement for engagement.” Warburton leverages an attention to the “spatial dimensions of resistance” in her reading of memoirs by Jesmyn Ward and Deborah Miranda to provide

a grounded approach to understanding the intersections of Black and Native women’s resistance to the geographies incumbent in anti-Black racism and settlement in the United States, while allowing the space, both literal and figurative, for tribal and communal specificity to remain meaningful locations.

In “Black Representations of Settlement on Film: Thomasine and Bushrod,” Beenash Jafri cultivates a critical reading practice that displaces a more common cultural studies focus on filmic representations of bodies, instead turning her attention to “representations of settlement.” Jafri’s reading of Thomasine and Bushrod reveals the contradictions the film stages as it simultaneously challenges “anti-blackness within a white settler state” and stages longings for “objects of settlement, including property ownership, heterosexual romance and the nuclear family.” Jafri’s reading points to the ways in which the film both affirms and challenges the settler state as such objects of settlement “are only available to the protagonists—whose social position as Black outlaws parallels that of the Black fugitive—outside of institutionalized white settler colonialism.” In this way, Black fugitivity emerges as a central theme in the film as cross-racial relations enable Thomasine and Bushrod to “rework—albeit in uneven, ambiguous and contradictory ways—dominant tropes of settlement.”

In his essay “Going Native: South Park Satire, Settler Colonialism, and Hawaiian Indigeneity,” David Maile offers a critical reading of “Going Native,” an episode of South Park in which a presumably White character, Butters, returns to his Native homeland to seek a cure for his uncontrollable rage. Maile’s reading exposes how the parody of “‘native Hawaiians’ going native” “exempts white settlers from enacting colonization” even as it “produces a discursive impossibility for Kanaka Maoli self-determination, sovereignty, and decolonization.” For while salvaging Hawai’i from “encroaching tourists and U.S. military forces” is beyond the capacities of “Native Hawaiian” resistance, Butters and other White settlers (also “Native Hawaiians”) successfully combat these threats to Hawai’ian sovereignty. As Maile argues, “Rather than signifying Native Hawaiians with agency, only white settlers going native demonstrate the possibility of self-determination over sovereignty, land, and culture.”

Rene Dietrich, in “The Biopolitical Logics of Settler Colonialism and Disruptive Relationality,” argues that universalized paradigms of European political thought render Indigenous polities illegible as foundational to both “the constitution of settler-states” and the “biopolitical production of Indigenous peoples as depoliticized populations.” To do so, Dietrich reads Foucault’s and Agamben’s theorizations of the biopolitics in conversation with Daniel Heath Justice’s novel, The Way of Thorn and Thunder: The Kynship Chronicles. For Dietrich, Foucault’s and Agamben’s treatments of biopolitics reproduce “foundational premises of western/European traditions of political thought,” such as the “hierarchization of life” that “enables conditions of enslaveability, colonization, settlement, genocide, heteropatriarchy,” as organizing principles of human life, as well as “species extinction, mass meat production and consumption, . . . the depletion, pollution, and degradation of land and waters,” as conditions that organize human relations to nonhuman life. Alternately, Heath’s treatment of relationality challenges this naturalization of a human/inhuman hierarchy to develop a “decolonial imperative” that animates a “liberating and transformative potential of a lived pluralist relationality.”

Eric Ritskes’s essay “Beyond and Against White Settler Colonialism in Palestine: Fugitive Futurities in Amir Nizar Zuabi’s ‘The Underground Ghetto City of Gaza’” offers a close reading of Palestinian writer Amir Nizar Zuabi’s short story “as an example of a fugitive trajectory that refuses inclusion into the colonial state through recognition.” Drawing on “Black radical thought and critical Indigenous sovereignty alongside Palestinian scholarship,” Ritskes details what is stake in “theories of refusal” that challenge liberal affect of hope and possibility.

Instead of paralyzing the fugitives, their abandonment of hope energizes them to dig, to build an entirely new city under the ground, to build an entirely new existence beyond the continual violence of the world above. What the abandonment of hope illustrates is that, within the colonial context of Israel, there never was any hope to begin with for the Palestinians.

In refusing the nation-state and settler notions of the human, Ritskes argues, the fugitives in Zuabi’s story gain the land, which is significant because “land is what roots Indigenous routes of flight against and beyond colonialism”; the land holds the past; it is “storied” and “the holder of memories and knowledge”; the “land also holds decolonial futurities that exist beyond settler futures”; the land “holds them and protects them.” Ritskes concludes that this profound engagement with the land reveals,

The decolonial future is not the emergence of one people at the expense of another, but a future where everyone’s right to be is affirmed and the challenges of working together to build with and on the land beyond the limits and definitions of settler colonialism are embraced.

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In many ways, this special issue can be read as an encouragement to make the turn toward analyses of settler colonialism that have been taken up with such excitement in other fields. We are grateful to the authors for considering the imperatives of this special issue so deeply, and to our reviewers for the generous and painstaking feedback provided on each article. We are excited too, that editors of CSCM have made space for these discussions, and hope that they launch generative collaborations and shifts in the field(s). Reflecting again on Shoemaker’s (2015) experience of a colleague being astonished that she had not engaged critiques of settler colonialism, we hesitate about the role of our work here and elsewhere to (appear to) impose dogma. We do not want our enthusiasm for the ideas herein to be misinterpreted. Even more, we do not want our enthusiasm to be misplaced—onto the field of settler colonial studies in and of itself, for example. Instead, let us locate our enthusiasm squarely upon the ideas and arguments which meaningfully attend to Indigenous land and to life lived on that land. This means we want to foreground and forward the works of Indigenous peoples while also prioritizing other discussions of life and cultural production on Indigenous land.